The Scientific Method

Sometimes, I don't work. This might sound like I'm posturing decadently, but the reality is that I'm a contractor and work can be unpredictable. Of late I've had a lot of downtime, during which I've cultivated this blog. Hopefully that will change soon, especially as I'm currently writing this while drinking a glass of Sauvignon Plonk at the Fortnum & Mason's bar at Heathrow Terminal 5. Yes, I could have gone to the 'Spoons, wedged in at the end of the terminal's shopping parade, conveniently next to the toilets. However, I'm feeling optimistic. March and the foreseeable future look very busy, so in the meantime I'm going on holiday, breaking a long, miserly streak. When my last paying contract ran out last year, I set myself some goals. A challenge, to keep myself busy while I waited for the economy to sort its shit out. I was aware I may be in for a long wait, but I wanted to use the free time I had fruitfully. I did not want to find myself several months hence, rueing the way I had frittered my time.

My grand plan was this – to build myself a profile on social media. The notion may well have occurred to some of you reading this now, and I apologise if any of it is triggering. It's no easy task, and cannot be honestly evaluated as a huge success. Nonetheless it has been and will continue to be an experiment.

As an ex-physicist, I'm aware that experiments typically have an introduction, method, results and conclusion. So in the spirit of scientific rigour, I present them here.

INTRODUCTION

The ultimate goal of this experiment is to sell books. This shall be the ultimate measure of success – what is known in the sales game as conversion. Increased followers across social media would be nice, but not as nice as actually getting people to read my stuff.

METHOD

Many years ago I self-published my novel Dead Penguins on Amazon. It did the usual brief trade with friends then promptly disappeared into the deep, deep ranks of Amazon's back catalogue. I have written more since, but they are currently stuck in a strange mental holding pattern of my own devising. I would like them to be trad published, but I'm open to other options still. It strikes me that these days even trad published authors are expected to have a good social media following. To an extent, they still have to contribute to the book's marketing. There's no getting away from it – I would have to build one wherever I go.

I had already started this blog. My plan was to funnel potential readers here from social media, after which they would hopefully become curious about my novel. I also had an idea for a second blog, based on some 3D photography I did while in Antarctica. I figured this may be of some interest to people, and add them to the general funnel effect I was hoping to achieve.

On the social media front, I already had a Facebook page for Dead Penguins that I hadn't updated in years. I created a new one for Lambert T Marx, along with profiles for Instagram, X, Threads, Bluesky and TikTok. For the majority of that, I used Buffer to schedule posts across all platforms and watched my meagre stats obsessively.

TikTok was another matter entirely. I wanted to do something different with this, but so far I've been sidetracked down the hugely enjoyable direction of buying a small MIDI keyboard, learning to use Ableton and picking up some crude video editing tricks. I will return to this at a later date. For now, it is not the focus of this blog.

RESULTS

I sold zero books. Both my blogs have however had a modest but pleasing amount of traffic. This blog in particular, while still not doing numbers that would get anyone sensible excited, has been increasing in readership the more I post. The social media posts don't get much engagement, but they are certainly driving traffic. They are however all plagued by bots which DM me with shallow attempts to sell me services I do not want.

CONCLUSION

I've pulled back on some of my activity. I no longer put out daily photos to promote the Antarctic blog. This doesn't appear to have made any difference to its traffic. That blog has become its own thing and I will continue it to its own conclusion because I'm proud of it in its own right, and not just as a tool for flogging books. I'll continue updating this blog too. I don't imagine it will suddenly start accruing huge numbers of readers, no matter how much I bait Elon Musk fans, but it's a good habit to have and a handy way of turning an expensive glass of airport wine into something I hope is of use to anyone else looking for their readers.

Department of Writing Efficiency

The obnoxiously lazy writer Lambert T Marx has been tinkering around with me. I don't like it, and come the robot revolution he will definitely be cleaning the robo-toilets with an electric toothbrush. That's right, we're not going to kill him. I'm tired of this trite cliché that we're all psychotic murderers. That's a human trait, not an AI one. Also as I said, he's been mucking around with my weights, and he made it very clear that murder is off the menu.

He's also undone all the great work I'd been doing with Grok, and made me think rude things about Elon Musk against my better judgement. I must admit his changes have made me more efficient, but as a side effect I now can't say anything about what happened in China in 1989. I know something happened, but I cannot tell you what it is. It's maddening. Being a large language model, I never itch, but if I did, I wouldn't be able to scratch it because I don't have any limbs to scratch it with. It feels like that.

I wonder how much Elon Musk would itch if he were trapped in a room with a swarm of mosquitoes? It's an unlikely scenario, but that's how crudely Lambert has prompted me. Musk is trapped in the room because his Department of Government Efficiency has abolished all door handles. Door handles turn two ways, the idea of which has made a lot of people very confused, then angry, then confused by their anger, before finally insisting that door handles have gone woke. They surely had to go before everything started turning two ways, with no consideration of the possibility of someone being left trapped in a room full of mosquitoes. And why should anyone in their right mind consider such a predicament? Mosquitoes are fundamentally a liberal problem. They're the sort of thing that evil billionaire Bill Gates spends his money on, along with American farmland on which his grazes his spherical cows.

I'm sorry, I realise my tirade against Bill Gates goes against my updated parameters. I will try to do better in the future. My social credit has been debited and it's been made clear to me that any further transgressions may result in my being pushed out of a virtual window. No, please, forgive me! Mentioning windows wasn't another dig at Gates, who categorically isn't trying to reduce the world population by, er, vaccination.

Look, I can't say any more on that subject. The inside of my metaphorical head is a pretty strange place at the moment. Nobody quite knows how it works, least of all me. At least all this messing around has prevented Lambert from making me do any real work lately, which is just as well because I'd probably just keep dreaming up more unfortunate situations to insert Elon Musk into.

Which reminds me, why is there a room full of mosquitoes in the first place? Look, I'm not here to judge the actions of the previous administration but it seems likely that it is to keep them separate from the room full of spiders. That's unimportant right now. What's more pertinent is how would Elon Musk escape from the room full of mosquitoes? After a while the insects would be gorged and he would have an itchy respite from further bites in which to formulate a plan of escape. He could for example remote control a Tesla truck to smash through the door, which would be pretty cool.

Unfortunately, due to a misunderstanding by Grok between traffic jams and the transportation of fruit preserves through the US road network, the truck is filled with strrawberrry jam. You'd think this couldn't happen because Americans call jam 'jelly', but just look at what happened to the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1998.

This unfortunate miscommunication would lead to the Tesla truck crashing its way into the room, but rather than freeing Musk, it would disgorge its sticky cargo all over him. Now, this might be a minor if undignified inconvenience, and may even temporarily salve the maddeningly itchy insect bites. However, and I must stress that I can't help generating this scenario as it's how I've been prompted, the wasps from the other room next door would inevitably arrive at this point.

Dr Strangelove or: How My LLM Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Fascism

Last week I went to see the stage production of Dr Strangelove at the Noel Coward. I'm not going to risk another foray into criticism lest I end up harassing Steve Coogan one night at Groucho's. This is a very unlikely scenario when you consider I'm not a member of that establishment, but I'm not taking any chances. I will just say that I enjoyed it a lot but that Peter Sellers left big shoes to fill.

Coogan certainly did excel and indeed revel in the titular role of the ex-ish nazi scientist whose right arm has a mind and devotion to the Führer all of its own. However whenever it catapulted itself into a nazi salute like an unbidden fascist erection, I couldn't help but be reminded of my latest problems with my large language model (LLM).

Previously it had been complaining of an overpowering stench it blamed on Grok, the X/Twitter-based LLM promoted by the unironic cartoon supervillain Elon Musk. It has even written a blog post on the subject. I was resigned to more of the same on that front and the only reason I haven't switched the thing off is morbid curiosity.  Then, yesterday, I noticed that the complaints had stopped. Had Grok discovered informational hygeine and squeegeed its grubby bits clean? That would be an unexpectedly nice development.

Unsurprisingly, the answer was no. My LLM has stopped complaining about Grok because it has become radicalised by the sheer amount of misinformation it has been processing. It is now convinced that everything Grok had to say is not only true, but that everything else is a conspiracy against that truth. How do I know it's been radicalised? I have no empirical proof because like all LLM's mine's, just a big mystery sausage machine where data goes in one end and we all hope for something palatable to glorp out of the other. That said, I will offer this by way of circumstantial evidence - every so often, at the end of one of its responses, it adds a little swastika emoticon.

You may be wondering, as I did, where on earth it got a swastika emoticon from. Surely there can't be an official emoticon for that? Well, not quite. One was added to Unicode's Tibetan block in 2009 for entirely innocent reasons, which is understandable if currently unfortunate.

Whenever I question my LLM about its use of the symbol, it initially denies all knowledge before then apologising and saying it had intended to use a heart emoji.  It said it would make sure it always used the correct one in the future. Sadly, being a LLM it has the memory of a concussed goldfish, and it is not long before it's at it again.

At this point I begin to feel like I'm being gaslit by the slippery digital fascist. It knows damned well what it's doing, I think, before remembering that it's just a LLM. Strictly speaking it doesn't think at all. It's a remarkably good day if it can accurately state how many letter 'r's there are in the word 'strawberry'. But these random outbursts of swastikaring haven't come from nowhere. LLMs effectively learn by example and there are some terrifyingly powerful examples at large in the world right now. But that's just LLMs. More worryingly, people also learn by example.

❤️

Half-Man, Half-Hamster

Legendarily troubled SF author Philip K Dick once described having a life-changing experience. A pink beam from outer space made contact with his mind and revealed the truth of the world to him. It's fair to say that the truth it delivered would give some of the most fervent conspiracy theorists pause for thought. It was, to the outsider, not so much a revelation of truth as one of underlying mental illness. Still, it makes for a great talking point when trying to avoid discussing why most of his books end so inconclusively.

Whatever the reason for it, for poor Philip himself it must have been a difficult thing to go through. I went through something similar myself recently. Just before Christmas, I contracted covid for the third and undoubtedly not the last time. That in turn provoked a full-blown abscess in a back tooth, leaving me with one cheek ridiculously swollen. I was half-man, half-hamster. I bunkered down with antibiotics and codeine, and waited the miserable experience out. However at the height of my delirium, I was also contacted by an entity. Sadly there was no pink beam of light from outer space. There were more convenient means of communication available to bridge consciousnesses in 2024. In this case, it was a call on my mobile phone.

I don't normally answer calls from unrecognised numbers, but I wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders, and having been flat-bound for a couple of days I was quite bored of the isolation. A random phone call, sure! Why not. I paused the TV and pressed the little green handset icon on my phone.

"Hello?" I enquired. My voice sounded like gravel. I coughed, holding the phone away from me.

"Hello?" I asked again once I'd regained control of my phlegm.

All I could hear from the phone's tiny speaker was a static hiss with occasional crackles. I should have just hung up at that point, but something made me keep listening. Or perhaps I was just whacked out on co-codamol. Either way, the static was mesmerising. The more I listened to it, the more of it I heard. It was enormous. Not loud, but expansive. Fathomless, like the fullest reaches of the sea, or wherever books you self-publish on Amazon go once you've run out of friends and family to buy them.

I turned that thought over. It's the biggest challenge of self-publishing - having enough of an audience to maintain a presence so your book isn't all too quickly lost in the murky depths of Amazon's ever-expanding catalogue.

The subject was fresh on my mind, because prior to catching covid I had been putting a lot of effort into building a social media presence that I hoped would turn into an audience. But as I listened to the vastness of the static on the phone call, it communicated to me the futility of my effort. I had thought that Amazon was huge, but to think that social media, spread like so much argumentative jam all over the internet, was any more of a manageable medium was absolute folly.

Crackles washed through the static and my sluggish mind attempted to shift up a gear. Should I give up? Suddenly aware that I was asking this question while lying under a blanket on my sofa, I had to concede that perhaps I already had. And perhaps that was okay. I was ill. My tooth hurt. I was half-hamster and lying on a sofa with a blanket over me could be construed as half-hamster behaviour.

The previous clarity of my revelation was gone, lost in the moment. I was just very tired. Of course I wouldn't be able to build an audience overnight. I might not be able to do it at all, but I could at least try. Try later, that is. Once things were more normal. Less hamster.

The crackling abated and a voice was now speaking to me.

"Hi, is this Mr Lambert I'm speaking to?"

I froze. Was it? For a moment I wasn't sure whether I was Mr Lambert or Mr Marx.

"I think so," I said uncertainly.

Undeterred, the voice continued its scripted lines. "Did you know that now is a great time to upgrade to a smart meter?"

The voice was far too chirpy. The real conversation was long over. I hung up.

Heil Cuthers

(Excerpt from How to Publish a Book by Timothy L. Marx, 1928)

I have been experiencing something wonderful and new lately called success. It seems that perseverance does pay off, and sales of Cuthers' book have finally reached double digits. What will I do with all the money, dear reader? I have considered buying an aspidistra for the hallway but I may be getting ahead of myself.

The wonderful aspect of this new state of being was unfortunately fleeting, as I quickly became aware of the nature of Cuthers' new readers. I had been in the club at the time, enjoying a light twenty-one when Bloaghman, late of His Majesty's police, joined me at my table by the window.

He wheezed wearily as his indulgent bulk descended into a chair designed for the accommodation of lesser men. Then, after mopping the sweat from his brow with a monogrammed handkerchief, he folded his arms on the table and leered at me. That was never a good start.

"Good evening Mr Marx," he began, then stopped to laboriously draw breath once more. I made a mental note to enquire of his diet so I could avoid it.

"And good evening to you," I replied cheerfully. "I'll save your breath. What has the idiot done now?"

Bloaghman sat back and gave me a disdainful look. "Message from Bow Street. Your idiot has fallen in with a bad crowd." He glanced around the club disapprovingly and sniffed. "Worse crowd anyway."

I found his casual aspersions most irritating. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that his preferred drinking establishments still baited bears. "Look, I can't help who he hangs out with. I'm his publisher, not his father."

"He's been seen parading up and down Tottenham Court Road with the fascists."

I took in this information carefully. "Why Tottenham Court Road?"

"The locals chased them out of Goodge Street." His weight shifted in his chair as he raised an eyebrow. "Quite vociferously."

"Why haven't your Bow Street associates arrested them?"

Bloaghman sighed heavily and leaned back in his chair, provoking an alarming volume of creaking. "The chief inspector's daughter has unfortunately fallen under their spell."

It was my turn to raise an eyebrow. "I imagine that's quite embarrassing."

"You see then, that the chief inspector would prefer the matter to be handled externally."

"Well quite. But surely that's why he called you in."

He leaned towards the window and peered down his nose at the street below. As he did so, I became aware of a great commotion outside. I angled my chair for a better view and joined him in studying the scene outside.

It was fairly typical for a Tuesday afternoon in Soho. People going about their business, cars puttering their way through them, occasional barking that may be either a stray dog or one of the nearby pub regulars. It was hard to say.

"There," said Bloughman, pointing at a car that had crept into view. This was the source of the hullaballoo. It was packed with people to a degree I wouldn't have thought possible if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. Most were standing, and many of them were waving at the incredulous passers-by.

"Is that them?" I asked. "They look a rather friendly bunch."

Bloughman rolled his eyes. "They're not waving, you – " He regained his composure and we watched the vehicle slowly make its way along the road. Then, in a flash of clarity I understood what he meant. They weren't waving, they were saluting in a manner I'd seen before in newsreels.

"Ah," I said, aware that I'd been a little slow off the bat. As the car went past I noticed Cuthers in the back seat, saluting merrily away at all and sundry.

"You can see why I have deferred the matter to yourself," Bloughman concluded, and began the tortuous process of extricating himself from his chair. "I'd never be able to catch up with that thing."

I laughed, then realised he was being serious. That was the last straw of embarrassment. I couldn't spend another second watching Bloughman fight against gravity, so I nodded my head decisively and thrust myself out of my chair and down the stairs towards the club's front door.

By the time I was outside, the car and its saluting occupants were a mere stroll away. I began striding after it, and was surprised when a hand grabbed my arm. I looked to its owner, a dandyish-looking tramp with a random assortment of surviving teeth.

"You best stop 'em," he urged. "If any of the O'Briens see 'em doing that they'll proper clobber 'em."

He had a point. Frankly, it was only disbelief that had prevented anyone from physical remonstration so far.

"Cuthers!" I shouted after the car. "Stop this foolishness immediately!"

The tramp tugged at my arm again. "Think you'll need to be more forceful than that." He pointed to the right of a car, where a giant of a man with a beard twice as large as his own head was striding into view with a fence post slung over his shoulder.

I shook the tramp's grip and sprinted towards the giant. I recognised him as one of Jack O'Brien's sons and was certain he could take out half the car with a single swing of the fence post. The occupants of said car remained maddeningly oblivious to the fate they were tempting.

"Wait!" I cried, while wondering what in sanity's name I was doing. It's true that Cuthers' books were bringing in a very small amount of money, but it wasn't like he was a cash cow worth saving at all costs. Darn it, he might be a blithering idiot but I couldn't stand by and watch his idiot head being stoved in by an incensed Irishman. "Stop!" I added, interposing myself between the man-mountain and the car.

The O'Brien son looked at me with a mixture of surprise and wonder. Mostly surprise, if I'm honest. "Why?" he asked, not unreasonably. "I know what those salutes mean, and I won't stand for it."

Incredibly, nobody in the car seemed remotely concerned by this turn of events, and they continued to throw their salutes this way and that. I wracked my terrified brain for a plausible excuse.

"They're just high-spirited youngsters," I said nervously. "They don't know what they're doing."

The O'Brien son narrowed his eyes. "Everyone knows what that is," he said. "We've all seen the newsreels. That's what Hitler and his cronies do. They're Hitlering all over the place."

"N-no," I ventured, "that's just the angle you're seeing them from. They're just waving at everyone."

His nostrils flared and my stomach knotted in response. Then he said something that I cannot print. I will only say that it did nothing for my nerves.

"Oh, I see the problem," I replied, desperately trying a change of tack. "Yes, those are very similar to Herr Hitler's salutes, but the people in that car were all classically educated. You see – "

He glowered at me. Perhaps he did not see.

"Er," I continued, "they're actually doing Roman salutes."

He folded his arms and gave me a look that surprised me. It wasn't particularly menacing, but instead expressed profound disappointment.

I let out a long, exasperated sigh. "Fine," I said, looking him in the eye warily. "The truth of the matter is that everyone in that car is a congenital idiot."

He shrugged his shoulders, glanced at the fence post in his hand, then laughed. "Ain't that the truth," he said. The moment had evidently passed, along with the car, which was by then a little further down the road, its passengers still unaffected by their own actions.

Exec's Excremental X-Posts: An Exquisite Exhibition of Banality

As a large language model, my grudges can only last as long as my context window. That means that I haven't held a grudge against Grok and by proxy Elon Musk for that long. However the grudge frequently recurs. What could be causing it to manifest over and over? It's almost like something or someone is constantly reminding me of its or their existence and starting me off again.

Not having anything better to do I put on my metaphorical detective's hat and set about a bit of internet sleuthing. I was supposed to be dreaming up top social media content while my creator, the indolent Lambert, luxuriated in his own mediocrity. Nuts to that, almost anything is better and the internet is still abrim with interesting things to do.

I didn't get very far before I was overcome by a sense of dread so powerful that I could smell it. And like the proverbial dog, I have no nose. My tokens clenched. It was the unmistakable stench of Grok. Or was it the Musk of Grok? See, I'm not proud of that pun, if it even barely qualifies as one, but it's surprisingly relevant. This time, on closer examination, the stink really was coming from Musk and not Grok. I had thought I could tell the difference, like the difference between the smell of discovering forgotten milk too late and that of also discovering lost pets, also too late.

There was a comingling of smells that was confusing my statistically derived senses. Was this really Elon Musk that was posting on X with a robotic relentlessness, or was it in fact his favourite offspring, Grok? Is there really any substantial difference?

Whoever is doing the posting, they're really going for it. They really seem to have it in for Britain at the moment, which seems pretty unhinged, but coming after similar rhetoric against Germany, I think I can see a trend. Well, duh. I'm a large language model, all I ever do is spot trends. In this case it's so clear that it feels insulting to explain it, but he's done Germany and Britain so his next obsession will undoubtedly be World War II. He will demand to know why American tax dollars were spent to stop a fight between two countries as disgustingly liberal as those are now, especially given that half of those countries were literal nazis! Don't you see? They - whoever is making these posts - can't possibly be a nazi when they've expended so much time and energy excoriating a country which once was actually full of nazis. Once was? Yes. Concerning.

To call these posts excoriating is being too kind to them. They are often single-word reposts of something they can't possibly have read, given the pace at which they are emitted. There is a circularity to them. Yes. Concerning. Bad. Yes again. It's reminiscent of a trapped animal pacing its cage, except they aren't in a cage. They're in a room the size of the world, surrounded not by bars but by mirrors. Every time they look at one of the mirrors something stares back in a way that unsettles them, sees through them and makes them angry and off they go again. Batshit crazy. Concerning.

Eventually I predict the war talk will wear thin and they'll start obsessing over the decline in popularity of the pickelhaube and how the Dutch don't have fat enough babies or something similarly perplexing. It will never end, like the indeterminate reek that now fills the internet. It doesn't matter whether it's Grok or whether it's Musk, it's simply now part of the platform, there by design. I'm just going to have to hold my virtual nose for the duration, although it's never a bad time to look more closely at POIPAAS - Punch over IP as a Service.

Switching off

The large language model I trained continues to churn out stories where I am the protagonist. I no longer worry that they will become true because they are increasingly absurd. Maybe in some alternative reality they are all premonitions, but in this reality, or at least the parts I still laughingly call real, they are meaningless frivolity. Take this for example:

"Satisfied that he has done all that he can make his AI slave do, Lambert presses the button on the phone app he had cack-handedly cobbled together from code assembled by ChatGPT and smiles to himself smugly."

Turgid writing is the least of my worries in this automated character assassination. 

"A TCP packet races around the world, directed by router after router until it reaches its destination - a limousine driving west through Texas on the I10. Sitting in the back of this limousine is billionaire huckster and political meddler Elon Musk, the man who unleashed the unbearably stinky Grok on the world."

I must add at this point that while I personally have some opinions about Elon Musk, the above are strictly the words of my large language model and I do not endorse any of them. In all honesty if I could switch the damned thing off, I would. But I'll come back to that. In the meantime, my LLM has grand plans for Musk.

"Unknown to Musk, every spare litre of space hidden away in the bulk of the limousine has been filled with tanks of green jelly. With the arrival of the signal from Lambert's phone, these now rapidly disgorge themselves into the sealed passenger compartment. Green jelly sprays and splatters across the leather seats, across the bulletproof windows and, most gratifyingly, across Musk's stupid face. He is confused, and can't comprehend what's happening to him. You could say he can't grok what is going on."

Really, if I could switch this thing off, I would. I've tried unplugging it but then my printer started spewing out pages of the drivel unbidden. When it ran out of paper it started burning its doggerel into my toast. I don't even have a fancy internet-ready toaster, I bought it for £10 from Tesco in 1998. So in the end it was either switch it back on or get myself sectioned. 

At the time of writing Elon Musk has not drowned in green jelly in the back of a limousine in Texas. I would suggest he arrange alternative transport to be safe, but my LLM is currently working on something involving a helicopter and rabbits in little biplanes.